Former U.S. House Speaker and one-time presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, spoke to a crowd of over 500 Republican supporters at a GOP Convention today in Missoula. "We should in fact speak well of our dreamer-in-chief. Now he can't run the economy, he ca't defend the country, he doesn't understand the Constitution, he surrounds himself with radicals who are out of touch with reality, but those are minor things," says Gingrich. "Just ask people, can they afford four more years of Barack Obama? I don't think ther's a town in this state that thinks that four more years of the pain...

Newt Gingrich Says Farewell In Web Video And Vows To Help Defeat Obama Without actually mentioning Mitt Romney, former Republican presidential candidate thanks supporters for a 'terriffic campaign' 1 May 2012 Newt Gingrich has said he will quit the race for the Republican presidential nomination and will throw his political weight behind Mitt Romney for the presidency in what he called the "most important election in our lifetime". Speaking in a web video to thank supporters, the former speaker of the House of Representatives did not endorse any other candidate, and made no mention of Romney by name. But he...

Washington (CNN) - Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are likely to meet in early May to discuss a Santorum endorsement, his role as a Romney surrogate and conservative policy issues, CNN has learned. John Brabender, a senior strategist for the Santorum campaign, told CNN that Santorum's goal is to have a policy-oriented session in which he tries to find a "comfort level" about the role "social conservatives, tea party activists and blue collar Republicans will play in the campaign and in the Romney administration." Even so, he said, "we are not walking in there with a litmus test. This is...

It was inevitable. Mitt Romney is going to sell-out conservatives in his party in order to win the general. And if he wins, he'll sell them out again in order to be re-elected.* Zeke Miller and McKay Coppins reporting for Buzzfeed have found the first issue on which Romney is trying to put some distance between himself and the conservative wing of his party. Allahpundit, one of the most perceptive conservative bloggers, also detects the hint of conflict between the GOP candidate and the GOP Congress. Mitt Romney told reporters today that he supports efforts to extend low interest rates...

I have to work today and tomorrow so I can't man any of Newt's phone banks, but if anybody can use this letter to forward in e-mails to your lists before tomorrow's primaries, please do so: Mitt Romney supports government-coerced abortion. He personally has made the decision to force people to provide abortions even though they believe it to be murder. Yes, he vetoed Romneycare because it mandated abortion insurance coverage, but in Dec 2005 after his veto was overridden and the Boston Globe printed an article noting that Catholic hospitals would be exempt from providing abortions to rape victims,...

Levin talks about what he says few have the guts to talk about, and that is how the Senate GOP establishment, McConnell, is trying to minimize conservative Sen. Ron Johnson who has made it clear he isn’t in the Senate to buddy up with the leadership, but rather to represent his constituents and fight for conservatism. And on the other hand, the establishment types like McCain are teaming up with one of the go-along-to-get-along increasingly liberal senators, Dick Lugar, to help him defeat a great conservative he’s running against. So while they claim to be conservative, what they really want...

The Newt Gingrich campaign found itself in a state of confusion Friday night when reports surfaced that Gingrich would cancel all of his stops in North Carolina next week, fueling suggestions that Gingrich would be suspending his campaign. But the campaign says nothing is happening. Two people close to the Gingrich campaign told ABC News they were contacted and told all of Gingrich’s North Carolina stops had been canceled, although R.C. Hammond, communications director for the campaign, said there was a “communication glitch.” “There was confusion, but we will maintain our North Carolina schedule next week,” Hammond said. One person...

Newt Gingrich Issues Statement on SantorumÂ’s Departure, Tells Mike Huckabee HeÂ’ll Â‘Finally Get to Be 1-on-1 With RomneyÂ’ Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was just on the Mike Huckabee Radio show, and commented on Santorum suspending his own presidential campaign just moments ago. On the show, Gingrich discussed finally getting to be Â’1-on-1â€˛ with Romney, how he will campaign going forward, and a possible debate in North Carolina with the current front-runner. Below are some highlights from HuckabeeÂ’s interview with Gingrich: Â“I did not get a heads up in advance. We have been talking for two weeks, and...

Clearly it's his campaign manager and the staff who are the problem.Alternate headline: â€śGingrich finally approaching the fifth stage of grief.â€ť ItÂ’s largely a strategy of necessity: The former House Speaker is a distant third in delegates, behind Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. His campaign-finance report for February, released last week, showed more debt ($1.55 million) than cash on hand ($1.54 million).DeSantis said the former Speaker will continue to visit states with primaries, but will have a less intense campaign schedule. DeSantis promised that the campaign will be Â“more positive and ideas-focused,Â” eschewing attacks on Republican rivals. The aide said...

Rick Santorum has shown he is a tireless campaigner and is the number one choice of evangelical voters. Now the former Pennsylvania senator is saying he is open to the idea of filling the nation's number two slot if his fellow GOP front-runner secures the party's nomination. In a Monday interview with CBN's David Brody, when Santorum was asked if he would consider running alongside Mitt Romney as the vice presidential nominee, he gave an affirmative reply. "Of course," Santorum told Brody. "I mean, look. I would do in this race as I always say, this is the most important...

NEW ORLEANS--It was less a campaign speech and more a general studies lecture. Standing against the backdrop of a chalkboard and two massive charts featuring the periodic table, Newt Gingrich spent his final campaign event ahead of Saturday's Louisiana primary addressing a classroom full of Tulane University students. For nearly 45 minutes, the former House speaker talked at length about an array of somewhat unexpected subjects, including the Wright Brothers feud with the Smithsonian over the birth of modern aviation—an analogy he made to highlight private enterprise versus over-the-top government spending. He described himself as a "dreamer" and defended his...

Rick Santorum's latest attempt to use a Mitt Romney aide's "Etch-A-Sketch" remark against the Republican front-runner instead gave his rival a chance to fire back on Thursday, after Santorum seemed to say he'd rather see President Obama reelected than send Romney to the White House. Speaking at an event in Texas, Santorum again made the case that Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom's comments Wednesday on CNN about a "reset" of the campaign if Romney clinched the nomination showed the former Massachusetts governor's efforts to appeal to conservatives were insincere. "You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision...

In a new interview, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich says he expects to finish in third place in the GOP delegate count and that there's a chance someone other than the four declared candidates could emerge from the party's August convention as the nominee. Neither of those statements is really news; various pundits have been saying the same for weeks. But what is newsworthy is that Mr. Gingrich has said them. While Mr. Gingrich is not completely abandoning his own aspirations to secure the nomination, he seems to be switching his main focus from running against President Barack...

If Newt Gingrich fails to win five states, he might not be eligible in the first round of voting at the Republican National Convention. That doesn’t mean he can’t be the nominee, and it may not even complicate his chances any further than they already have been... [...] If no candidate wins on the first round of voting, primary and caucus results will matter progressively less. Some states’ delegates are bound by primary results only through the first round of convention voting. Others’ are bound through the second and third. If Gingrich enters the convention ineligible, he can still win...

The media is smearing Gingrich right and left while going relatively light on Santorum. We don't know who he is, we haven't examined his record thoroughly, we blindly believe in faith the statements he as a Christian family man uses to make a quick point, and he is the last one standing to experience the negative carpet bombing from Mitt Romney.

The organization that ignited the tea party as a national mass movement gave Mitt Romney perhaps his biggest victory yet, deciding to drop its opposition to his candidacy, a top executive in the group told The Washington Times. FreedomWorks, which organized the Sept. 12, 2009, mass demonstration on the Mall, says that while it will not give an explicit endorsement, the time has come for Republicans to unite around the former Massachusetts governor and focus on defeating President Obama. “It is a statistical fact that the numbers favor Mitt Romney,” FreedomWorks Vice President Russ Walker told The Times on Tuesday....

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich says Rick Santorum’s double-digit loss in the Illinois primary shows he is not the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney — and he can’t defeat President Barack Obama..... “Governor Romney had a pretty good day — I think he took a step towards clearly proving he was the front-runner. Senator Santorum didn’t have a particularly good day,” Gingrich said. “This is the third time now he has tried an industrial Midwestern . . . state and not succeeded. And I think that the conservatives have to think through the right strategy if they hope to stop Romney....

September 3, 2008 Interview with TPMtv - Santorum says that the GOP has moved away from the Goldwater, "small government" ideas. The full interview can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3uqZSih_wYU

Sunday, March 18, 2012 It's Time For Gingrich To Drop Out of Race For GOP Nomination EDITORIAL The time has come for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to drop out the Republican presidential race and allow Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to battle it out for the GOP nomination. After an up-and-down campaign, Gingrich based his chances primarily on a Southern strategy. That worked, with wins in South Carolina and Georgia. Then Gingrich set his sights on Alabama and Mississippi, where voters make their decisions on Tuesday. Gingrich had been first or second in those two states in pre-election polls....

PRINCETON, NJ -- Republican voters who prefer Newt Gingrich for the party's 2012 presidential nomination are as likely to name Mitt Romney as their second choice as they are to name Rick Santorum, suggesting the race would not tilt in Santorum's favor if Gingrich dropped out.

March 16, 2012 Parker: Republican race is just getting started By STAR PARKER, Scripps Howard News Service After Rick Santorum's victories in Tuesday's Alabama and Mississippi primaries, Mitt Romney told Fox News, "We're not going to go to a brokered convention." But those who put their money where their mouths are, buying contracts on the Intrade.com online prediction market, assess the picture much differently. The latest Intrade.com probability that the Republican nominee will be selected in a brokered convention is 21.5 percent. This same probability stood at 5 percent in early February. Ed Rollins, the veteran campaign manager and consultant...

PALATINE, Ill.--Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on late Wednesday expressed frustration with both the news media and the Republican establishment for failing to understand his “large ideas” for transforming American politics. As calls for Gingrich to bow out of the race grew louder after his second-place finishes in Mississippi and Alabama--two states he said he had a chance to win--the candidate seemed to be in low spirits and offered a grumpy analysis of the state of the GOP primary to a crowd that gathered for a Lincoln Day dinner in this northwestern suburb of Chicago. “The thing I find most disheartening...

As Rick Santorum desperately tries to make a dent in Mitt Romney’s formidable delegate lead, he faces an unlikely obstacle on the primary calendar: his home state of Pennsylvania. Yes, Santorum is currently favored — though hardly a lock — to win the popular vote in the state he represented in Congress for 16 years. But Pennsylvania’s non-binding primary rules for distributing delegates raise the prospect that Santorum, who has said he’ll win the vast majority of the state’s delegates, could actually come away from next month’s primary empty-handed at a time when he can ill-afford it. Which means the...

It was unbelievable: As soon as Newt Gingrich failed to win both Alabama and Mississippi in the GOP race for president, most members of the mainstream media and political strategists with whom I talked readily admitted, off the record, that he was the most qualified among the Republican candidates to serve as president. Now these are objective pros that have been around presidential politics for years. I have no doubt they were telling me the truth because these folks only tell you this stuff when it is relatively clear that the candidate is no longer a viable alternative. The Gingrich...

Gingrich Calls Political System Stupid, Vows To Stay In The Race By NBC's Alex Moe PALATINE, Ill. – Hours after finishing a disappointing second place in both the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, Newt Gingrich marched his campaign onward, vowing he is “staying in the race.” Campaigning in Illinois on Wednesday, Gingrich made little mention of the two contests he had hoped to win in the South. He instead focused his speeches on the big ideas that drive his campaign, explaining that many people just don’t understand what needs to be done to help change the country. “The thing I find...

MARCH 16, 2012 Tampa Tempest Newt Gingrich Plots Convention Chaos. By Robert Costa As he waited for the returns on Tuesday, Newt Gingrich didn’t pay much attention to the soft flicker of Fox News. Instead, as he sat with his family and a few aides in a suite at the Wynfrey Hotel in Birmingham, Ala., he was quietly glued to his BlackBerry, thumbing his way through e-mails. He was mostly cheerful, according to those in the room. He reminisced about campaigns past with his daughters. He reviewed his schedule; he bantered with his wife, Callista; he settled on a purple...

GOP being Punk’d? We know that Democrats are crossing over in open primaries, such as Mississippi and Alabama, in order to vote for Rick Santorum, a big union candidate, their votes intended to throw the Republican National Convention into a contested balloting process. This tactic was written up at the Daily Kos. Big union money has even invested for the Santorum campaign. Pardon me for not having all the pertinent facts and I confess I don’t even have time to search for them all, today, to say nothing of presenting and formatting them, here. Can you help? Place further information...

Unbelievably, Shep Smith just felt it necessary to push out some exit poll data that he says indicates that among those who only recently made their decision, those voters are going for Romney or Santorum. And this is with the polls still open. I have to ask, why is he pushing out exit polling data that clearly could have a negative effect on one candidate's turnout? This is even worse than CNN's coverage of exit poll data. CNN has only been breaking it down by Conservative/Evangelical/income levels, etc.

Thankfully, former Speaker Newt Gingrich is every bit a social conservative as the former senator from Pennsylvania, and so would have that historical advantage that, along with the “It’s the economy, stupid” rule, regularly results in the election of Republican presidents and congressional majorities. So how did the young whippersnapper who previously won our Super Tuesday endorsement by avoiding anti-Bain venture capitalism-pile-ons while also contrasting his unblemished record against individual health care mandates as opposed to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts RomneyCare and 2009 advocacy for the individual mandates in ObamaCare? Unprompted, he essentially took the economy off the table for the...

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich on Friday called on Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to resign, rebuking him for telling a congressional panel that the U.S. would “seek international permission” before intervening in the ongoing bloodshed in Syria. “I have been told that the secretary of defense has suggested that international agreements override the Congress,” Gingrich told supporters in Gulfport, Mississippi. “If he believes that, he should resign tonight.” Responding to a statement that the U.S. was placing military resolutions of the United Nations, NATO and the Arab League ahead of those made by Congress, Panetta told the Senate Armed Services...

(CBS News) BILOXI, Miss. - The four main candidates for the Republican nomination for president say they're committed to staying in the race right up to the convention this August in Tampa, Fla. There's just one problem: If they do, it might turn out that no one gets the number of delegates needed to win the nomination outright. Stumping in Birmingham, Alabama, Mitt Romney continued his Southern charm offensive, celebrating an endorsement from the country band Alabama. "Wouldn't you love to hear them sing 'Sweet Home Alabama'? Wouldn't that be wonderful?" he asked a crowd at one campaign stop. In...

(CNN) – Newt Gingrich is edging out his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in Mississippi, according to a new poll. The American Research Group survey of likely Republican primary voters released Friday showed Gingrich with 35% support, followed by Mitt Romney with 31%, Rick Santorum with 20% and Ron Paul with 7%. Gingrich's margin over Romney increased slightly among those who said they will definitely vote in the March 13 primary, 37% to 30%. Santorum garnered 17% support and Paul received 5% among the same group. The poll was conducted after Super Tuesday, when each of the GOP White...

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum hoped to lock down a victory in Kansas' GOP caucuses with two rallies Friday but faced grumbling from tea party activists for skipping their big rally in the state's largest city................. Some tea party members were frustrated that Santorum wouldn't attend their rally. They spent $25,000 to rent the Century II arena in downtown Topeka and expected 1,000 to 3,000 people to attend. "It seems like it is counterproductive to show up for an event that is going to have 300 people in an airplane hangar instead (of) 3,000 people in...

Does the Tea Party now support politicians who favored bailouts and the ObamaCare individual mandate? Such a statement sounds like an oxymoronic joke, about as likely as a pacifist who backs war or an atheist for Jesus. But the answer, according to exit polls from New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida primaries, is an emphatic “yes.” According to each of these exit polls, the vast majority of self-identified Tea Party supporters have backed either former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (left) or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich over anti-bailout candidates such as Texas Congressman Ron Paul, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum,...

As a journalist who covered Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania for years, I can understand the Tea Party’s infatuation with him. It’s his anger. It is in perfect synch with the constituency he is wooing. Even at the height of his political success, when he had a lot to be happy about, Santorum was an angry man. I found it odd. I was used to covering politicians who had good dispositions — or were good at pretending they had good dispositions. Santorum was different... People who don’t know him — and just see the angry Rick — don’t realize what a...

There is a perception lingering about NewtGingrich that he was a critic of PaulRyan's budget plan and therefore a critic of conservative fiscal policy in the House of Representatives. Is that conclusion true? Or is it an oversimplification? Like many misconceptions floating around during a heated political season, it is not true. Let's examine the facts. On April 5, 2011, Representative PaulRyan, the HouseBudgetCommittee chairman, introduced the Republican budget for 2012. Included in that budget was a premium support model for Medicare. This budget was based on a similar plan previously laid out by Ryan called TheRoadmapforAmerica'sFuture. That document had...